usenet weirdness

Now that we're dragging Einstein into Relativity Theory, I'd suggest his book "Out of My Later Years" since it's about the most recent publication.

If you're bored or interested, I found a copy of it and read through the relevant sections in my video essays "Reading from Einstein's "Out of My Later Years"".

One thing to note is that he doesn't so much declare that it's about "total field theory", instead it's his ideas as they were framed in the language of Relativity Theory, which as he puts it is the idea of "just imagine that in this Universe of Absolutes that there's not absolute Motion", basically saying that that's a fixed place to consider the things. So, quite very much it's about "absolutism" and for _continuity_ a "total" field, theory.

About matter, Einstein has thoroughly that matter is _inert_, about being an _inertial system_ the theory with regards to matter. I.e., it's not entertained the weak nuclear and electroweak forces, and also light's on the side. In "Out of My Later Years" he doesn't much talk about E & M at all.

Then, about "Relativity Theory" its formalism, he describes it as a _differential system_, that essentially representing its continuity, and furthermore that _why_ it's so is he attaches a clock hypothesis to that. So, what's "the needful" for the theory is that it's as much an integral-system as a differential-system, as long as it's a continuum mechanics. This also makes for that it's Euclidean, the geometry.

Then, Einstein makes some apologetics about SR, and about that "SR is local", again putting light rather on the side, where instead there's "GR first", an inertial-system and differential-system.

So, then Einstein makes a nice little defense of Newton, which is after Galileo and the Mertonian school and since concepts of power and resistance and power and potential. Then, what he does is setup an attack on Newton, since after the motion/motion and rest/rest bits the equal/opposite is contrived. This sets up his account of a second mass/energy equivalency derivation about the centrally symmetric and radially symmetric since kinematics are essentially un-linear, "Einstein's Bridge".

Then, that about being it, that sort of account got attached to Bose-Einstein condensates after Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen the condensed matter physics, yet really it's to be connected, "Einstein's Bridge", directly to mechanics, to make an account of real space-contraction-linear and space-contraction-rotational.

Here then that's a usual concept of "heft", after "mass" and "weight". I made that up, though.

If you aren't rude about it, people have no reason to stop posting it.

He seems to be a mathematician. I've known a couple. They can talk very intelligibly when not talking about mathematics. With at least one at least my eyes would glaze over until he said "and it generalises" and we got back to stuff I could follow. Nice guy and he married a nice girl.

My father was physical chemist who worked in the paper industry, and needed to analyse his data. He talked to the professor of statistics at his old university (one of his nephews had the job for a few years some thirty years later) and ended up buying R.A.Fisher's "The Design of Experiments". I grabbed it after he died. It's the third edition, published in 1942 (the year I was born) and still has the original dust cover, but he did use it.

Poisson comes to mind.

Don't remind me. I once put together a random noise generator for female friend before I knew about Gibbs oscillation, and I had to apply a Hamming window to the 32 resistor values in the tapped shift register filter to get it to work as intended. Every last one of them had to be changed, which took me about an hour with the soldering iron. Her sending it back to me in England from Germany took about a week, and it took as long for me to send it back. Embarrassing but educational. Eventually it confused her bats echo-location as intended.

There are a host of good ideas, or at least ideas that strike the people who think them up as good. If they don't fit the experimental evidence it's easy enough to throw them out, but if there isn't enough experimental evidence it gets harder to kill off the bad ideas.

The March 7 2026 New Scientist - which got to me today - talks about something like this happening with the

But it's formulation was heavily constrained by what had been observed. The cosmological constant was put in to kill off the expansion of the universe, because Hubble's observations that seemed to show that it was expanding were not available at the time.

You can blame him for starting on his project before quantum physics had gotten far into the nucleus.

It may be easy, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Einstein was about as sane as anybody could be. General Relativity pulled together Lorentz's work with a bunch of other observations and managed to explain the precession of the orbit of Mercury and predict the shift of stellar images when the light involved had grazed the sun.

It was a testable theory that improved our understanding of our observations. The Michelson-Morely Ether Drift experiment might be seen as the starting point. Eisntein seems to have seen it that way.

People keep on proposing new observations, and some of the proposals get funded. The politics that determine which proposals get funded involve regular humans and their known defects, but science is a scheme designed to get around the worst of those defects. It isn't perfect, but Donald Trump is a prize example of how it could be worse.

That's been my bread and butter for a lot of my professional life. A great deal of bug-hunting is identifying where "interference" is coming from, and reducing it.

As an experimentalist, I'm conscious that every experiment has a level of experimental error. If Richardson was getting his data from three different experiments, he was bound to get three different results.

Random errors can be expected to average out. Systematic errors won't. My impression is that we got rid of the systematic errors fairly early on.

No. A pair of electrodes that applied an electric field across the beam. I chose to drive them symmetrically which turned out to have been a fortunate choice.

A 2kV beam wasn't moving fast enough to cover 18mm in half a nanosecond, so we tilted the gap so the beam was exposed to a to the field over a shorter period. It got deflected less, but a 2kV beam is easier to defect than a 15kV beam.

The blanking plates were located at one of the conjugate points in the three lens focusing system, so applying the blanking voltage didn't move the focal point of the electron beam on the specimen (and the gear was set up to let you test for this, by applying a smaller blanking field that didn't move the beam far enough to get it beyond the 0.1mm blanking aperture).

There were lots of twiddle screw to let you put the blanking plates and the blanking aperture at the right places around the beam.

The electron beam microfabricators included a similar structure to let you turn the beam on and off, but it didn't have to be nearly as fast (10MHz versus 2GHz) and was lot cruder. I had to clean up the electrical driver for that too - the original circuit was easy to burn out.

An elliptical orbit trades kinetic energy for gravitational potential energy.

The sun will have tides too and the tidal ridges and valleys on the surface of the will influence the movement of the earth, and the movement of surface of the sun will absorb energy. There will be tidal dissipation in the sun, but not much of it.

I'm sure that most of it is. The solid earth also distorts - earth tides

- but doesn't flow very far.

The band-pass and Kalman filters are so ubiquitous, that it's often not even considered that they don't perfectly make for reconstructing the analog.

It seems like a lot of mathematics these days is so much about the embarrassment of resources of the computing milieu that there's not much made of analysis, just regression to the mean.

That said, then there's certainly opportunity in analysis and design over crunching and iteration, since analog computing still has some unique capabilities.

The Kalman filter shows up a lot, it's just so usual, or so it seems from somebody who's not an electrical engineer by trade, there's yet something to be said for analog approaches like integrators.

Thanks for writing.

Einstein was a madman insisting we should stop synchronizing clocks for the sake of the symmetry of his pretty little formulas. Even his hardest fanatics don't, of course - they limit themself to talk that is what should be done.

General Relativity

If you're told you have to observe because of some "laws of nature" invented by your idiot guru, and you trust your idiot guru

- you observe. That's all.

What do you think an "observation" is? I will tell you: it is a process of converting pictures(also sounds, smells and touch, but mostly pictures) into text. Explaining why it is important would be long, what matters is that nature doesn't affect text, it's all ours.

F*ck your understanding. The clocks will keep indicating t'=t, not because of some delusional "laws of nature", but because of what we need them for. Anyone can check GPS, or any other timekeeping system. The wannabe standards Einstein's church is trying to enforce are - simply - ignored, common sense has been warning the idiot.

The Michelson-Morely Ether Drift experiment might be seen

And it usually succeeds. The S*it of Einstein just demonstrates that's not for sure. There is no method for being infallible.

There is alef0 of possible interpretations. An "error" or just a "delusion" included. We can really fit any result into any theory, but whether it's easy or hard - matters.

Richardson in "The Electron Theory" has basically a great survey of the arrival of electron physics and is very steeped in both the accounts of experiment and accounts of the derivation.

The copy I purchased was from an antiquarian bookfair, $80, marked down from $185. It says here it's the second edition of 1916. So, it's going to vary about the 1919 and the 1918 and the 1921.

Talking about measuring the electron, first he describes Geiger and Rutherford, then about H.A. Wilson with water droplets then eventually Millikan with oil droplets.

" ... it is a logical development of the views held a century ago by Davy and Berzelius and especially of the views to which Faraday was led by his electro-chemical discoveries made somewhat later."

"It may be permissible to recall that Maxwell's electromagnetic theory has been found to account satisfactorily for the behavior of light, and electromagnetic waves in general, in free space; but that difficulties presented themselves when phenomena like refraction and dispersion, which depend upon transmission through material media, where considered."

Then he talks about Roentgen.

So, Richardson splits electron theory into stoichiometry, the relation to optics, and nuclear theory.

(Now, when talking about Faraday and then Zeeman, since Zeeman basically gives for spectroscopy a restricted interpretation of Faraday's account of light's behavior in media according to magnetism, or about those being photons not electrons, it's so that species above hydrogen have more than one spectral line, and so, spectroscopy and its great success after Rayleigh-Jeans and so on, still has that it's not a full view and conflates optical phenomena with electrical and magnetic phenomena. Then, about radio waves versus electron beams, and light rays versus lasers, and making the dispersion or refraction, then diffraction, of electrons that otherwise don't do that and of photons that otherwise don't do that, here is that "optical (visible) light is special", with regards to not agreeing about light and "electromagnetic radiation", with the usual account of energy as the quantity, about frequency and wavelength. Matters of intensity and so on are going to vary. -- me)

He says Thomson and Wiechert independently arrived at there being a charge/mass ratio.

So, he gets into Thomson then about C.T.R. Wilson and ultra-violet light as ionizing, again, that's getting into the nuclear character of ionizing radiation, about the special character of optical, visible light.

Then Millikan basically makes a repeatable experiment using oil droplets instead of water droplets and simple apparatus of coils and piles.

Richardson says "for our electrons having negative charge, we're not talking about positively charged electrons".

He mentions Stark about molions above atomions that would be about structural chemistry, then says we're not talking about it.

" ... and the electron theory is the science of the properties of the aether, of which the electric charges are local modifications."

(That I suppose will have its issues, since it mentions that electron theory is part of aether theory, yet though for example later writers like Einstein uphold that there's an aether in the theory.)

"The field of force arising from a single electron is assumed to obey the same laws as that arising from a small charged particle in the theory of electrostatics."

Then he gives an inverse-square law, or rather, that's what's given.

So, then he's setting up formalisms about coordinates and then gets to Gauss theorem then Green's theorem, those being readable as about "flux" and "flow" variously and basically each being partial accounts, then about Poisson and Laplace the setting of the sum of second partials in space coordinates, i.e. partial derivatives so ignorant the interacting terms.

So, it's going to start reminding me of Crookes here,

about ionized media.

By page 57 he startes discussing fictitious charges, or as today would be fictitious forces, as reside in the dielectric or "the stresses" or "vibrations" that are theorized in the media, that's related to the nuclear theories their accounts, and that as above that so far in "The Electron Theory of Matter" that electrons are at least three things (generally postulated to have a charge/mass ratio and a quantity of charge in a field of forces in an aether the space then the medium).

So, in Chapter IV "The Electron Theory of Dielectric Media" he immediately introduces the "potential due to a doublet" and separately "the moment of a doublet". Then he builds polarization as about those.

In Chapter V "magnetism" he points out Gauss' study of it and then about that it's disconnected from the electron theory, then in Chapter VI "electromagnetism" after Stokes' then there are given various accounts of current, displacement current, and convection current (which would be related variously to matters of "flow" and "flux").

What I'm looking for then is where he defines constants 'c' as I recall it, ..., by page 109 he makes special reference to Larmor as also that in the introduction he made special reference to Larmor as guiding the field, "Aether and Matter".

Then, on p.123 in "electromagnetic waves" is about velocity, then on p.122 begins the mention:

"More recent determinations have shown a continually increasing agreement between the values of 1) the ratio of the two units of electric charge, 2) the velocity of electric waves and 3) the velocity of light in space. The agreement of the results of different observers is well exhibited by the following numbers which are taken from Jeans's _Electricity and Magnetism_, p.506."

He gives the _mean_ of the quantities as 2.991 x 10^10 centimeters/second. These days it's usually enough the 2.998.

"We shall defer to the next chapter the consideration of the causes which make the behavior of bodies of light different from that predicted by the simple form of the electromagnetic theory which we have been discussing."

That's rather telling, he's telling us they're different, light and electromagnetic radiation, then that the units of charge 1 above is given as meeting c one way, and wave velocity the usual account of signals in air, those being three different things, "constants 'c'".

Back on page 67 or so there's Poisson's theory of dielectric media, then about the three kinds of current and the three constants "c" after the charge doublets and doublet moments getting involved.

It's actually that the constants 'c' are derived from their respective theories, then as with regards to their agreement.

Actually it doesn't matter, but I think that Einstein wasn't a particularily smart person.

I have analysed his paper 'On the electrodynamics of moving bodies' very carefully and found roughly 390 errors in it.

Also his language was quite weak, even if he spoke German. But after ten years at Princton his English was just terrible.

But that doesn't matter, of course, because he wasn't famous for language.

...

TH

Am Dienstag000010, 10.03.2026 um 17:13 schrieb john larkin:

What he apparently meant:

there had been several approaches to utilise hypercomplex numbers and none had worked.

I wanted to express, that my system, composed of biquaternions and Pauli algebra, looks quite promising.

Have a look yourself:

TH

Am 11.03.26 um 09:57 schrieb Thomas Heger:

They said on the radio there was a wrong-way driver on this highway - but there are hundreds!

Gerhard

Einstein has both said so and denied it, on different occasions. It seems probable that even if it did play a part it was a minor one. What clinched it seems to have been stellar aberation, and Fizeau's partial aether drag results.

Jan

Perhaps, but the problem is not fitting the evidence. The problem is that they do not even relate to the evidence, and are clueless about how that might come about. (so they fall back on string theory landscape and anthropic principles)

Jan